Like Oranges
by RaymondShaw
Summary: "You're alchemy, Alexandria; you only make me seem so." And he is trapped within the fingers of a child, held up against his brow and kissing him. "No little girl could stop the world to wait for me." – Natalie Merchant, from the song 'My How You've Grown'


_It's beautiful. I'll keep it with me forever._

* * *

His hands are graceless – covered in callouses; an indentation on the inside of the little finger of his right hand paler than the rest of his palm, gleaming almost silver from the time he'd tried catching bullets in an act and survived. Riddled with the littlest cuts that look like they were caused by paper, to linear gashes with their own history peppered over his skin – as cliché as it might sound, there is a story to each and every one of them. Though he might not care to remember and specify, he knows: each bruise, each wound was a brick earned, cement as he built himself upwards.

He wouldn't have fallen as hard, otherwise.

With her good arm, she turns his hands over in hers; little palms and grubby childlike fingers – he can hardly believe they are fit for picking oranges. But Alexandria is an adult trapped in the body of a child; still coming to life in the awareness of the world around her, learning little by little to be wary – but never of him. Her other arm hangs askance from her shoulder, held up in a stiff cast of rigid plaster bandage. He's had his fair share of broken bones, but on this little girl it looks...well, _strange_. When she walks she does it stiffly, like a wooden doll with poorly-fitted joints, because of that stupid cast and he might laugh…if he were in a position to do so.

Roy..._Roy can't feel his legs._

And the adult-child trusts him; she pokes the skin underneath his eye, the silver of a scar there, kisses his cheek wet and citrus-sticky. Says, "Roy, Roy – story," as if she somehow understands that she holds the pieces of him in her hands, like the old marble of tombs unearthed from archaeological sites to suffocate behind the glass of display cases in museums. Pieces of a wreck. A washed-out stuntman. History all the same; the little details, forgotten. Later no one sees his confused smile in the darkened theatre (that was actually nothing more than a small empty hospital room, but Alexandria liked the sound of the word, _theatre_) when he realizes they've cut his stunt out of the movie, cut his fall, his spectacular spiraling notion-shattering _fall._ He feels like he's had his soul erased, stolen from him. But Roy figures he can't miss it; because you build yourself up knowing you'll fall, and you have to gear yourself up for disappointment because Hollywood kisses and kills you and Alexandria is so small in his hands, and her eyes are like the glimmering brown dust of mocha beans and she wants to hear his story, she wants to hear about _Roy._

So, he tells her.

* * *

And then there are men like Sinclair, hair slicked back and gleaming black as shoe polish, with their smooth Mediterranean good looks, even smiles, and suits that kill a man to think about. Men like Sinclair who are heroes, who always get the girl, who stand beneath the sun and move like gold only because the real heroes, with all the gun-spinning tactics and train-jumping fiascos, deal and hide in their Shadows. For the picture, Roy was Sinclair's Shadow. So he _knew _he was better, because the stuntmen are the cojones that make the leading man. And even if Roy was replaceable, no one thought stunts like him, no one thought of flinging themselves off a train bridge to death and that was _all_ Roy.

For a moment, falling...falling Roy felt like death, like God;_ like he would never land._

But he did.

He landed where Alexandria was, where she'd survived her own first fall. Where her scrawled note came fluttering in through the window, diamonds cut through the paper, spelling appalling enough to make him start – and she'd come in, precocious and obnoxious and tart, snatching it from his hands and stomping out and he'd called her back, called after her, because...he didn't know why. He'd wanted to know how she got that cast, if he wasn't the only stupid-looking one and she'd said, "I fell."

I _fell._

And Roy had told her a story because he…the landing, the landing was _craptacular_, and he wanted to leave, he wanted to sleep and never wake up. Just like in the stories. And Alexandria with her gapped teeth, her taciturn braids, the clap of her shoes against the floor when she came to see him, to see _Roy – _it was bright, and Roy was God again, but playing with something precious. Juggling an intricate house of cards because Alexandria was an enigmatic adult-child chimera but she was still only a child, and she brought him oranges and spilled his coffee, and he'd peel the skin off the fruit and feel that grudging adulation and felt that he was gearing up for his own fall, his last fall this time – and Alexandria would help him.

He would leave her behind.

But if life wasn't fair, death was hardly any different. The pills were a placebo for the other man, the twist in the tale, his own liberty stolen from him. Roy used to do his jumps on his own terms; now he couldn't even _die_ on his own terms, he couldn't walk, he couldn't keep the girl – the girl who sat in the car dabbing the ladylike tears from her eyes, _careful now_ in case her mascara ran or her rouge streaked and Sinclair was smoking cigarettes and smiling and his manager was going over disclaimer and responsibility papers just so he wouldn't sue, because _because._

Alexandria falls, again. She splits her head open and he can feel his ribs clench bruisingly around his heart and lungs, his stung throat so tight it hurts to breathe, and he'd been a rotten God because he _should have known_. He didn't deserve to be a God, even of his own stories – he'd crossed his fingers on himself, he was the Masked Bandit, because he was a _coward_ who believed in foolish stories and fancies and never saw the ground coming 'til it hit him and killed him. And Alexandria was an adult-child and he was a false God, and she wouldn't _listen_ to him when he told her _don't __believe__ me; I'm a liar, a gypsy, a joker and a fool – don't believe me, I tricked you_ and she shakes her head and her face is red and blotchy, her eyes groggy from sleep and grief she feels but doesn't understand, because _why, Roy? Why're you doing this, don't kill them; why is everyone dying, why are you killing them?_

"Don't die, Roy – no. I don't want you to die. Don't kill him, let him live, Roy. Let him live."

_But I have to, this is the truth._ They kiss and kill you, kiss and kill you; and you don't _deserve _anything, you're lying to yourselves, things like virtue and honour and camaraderie _don't exist in this world_ and they might have in the beginning but not in the end and he's going to _finish_ the story; he might as well. "You wanted to hear it." There's tequila loosening his tongue, and his heart clenches tighter, chokes with failure. Because he _fell._ "Let me finish it. It's my story."

"No." Her tears; they're for you, for Roy. And –

– And _oh_, you are a _fool_. Somewhere a man is drowning in a pool barely as deep as a pond. Governor Odious holds him down but that's not it; the man can't feel his legs, he doesn't want to, he won't get up. And the mystic vomits up birds that escape from wailing lips, gums red and toothless like an infantile old man's, has his hair torn off his head like a never-been Samson, is flung across the trees he loves so much; beaks spasming up his gullet and, uncoiling deep in his gut, feathers and dust and old, old nostalgia. The Indian's big hands grip tightly on his turban rope, brilliant almond eyes dark but never quiet; there's a knife held between his teeth and he looks into your eyes and _slashes _the lifeline. Oh! A man huge and gleaming black under the sun, the ground keening under the pound of his sure bare feet, saves a girl, and every pelting arrow is like the crack of a whip's lash; and he struggles and he carries and he stumbles and he falls back, dead and free at last. Darwin in that ridiculous feather-trimmed coat, hankering like a child, holding a monkey close to his chest; cradling his own genius and not knowing a name to call it by. And laughing, a burst of a thousand fireworks lights up the midday sky with smoke, and a whole city's foundation falls – Luigi, Luigi, Luigi. Two-legged and now in too many pieces, smoking and burning like bacon. Dead.

_And somewhere, _here_. There's a paper-thin circle in her hand; she takes a bite out of it, insolent and ignorant, and holds it up to his face. Roy asks, is asking, _"Are you trying to save me?" _and she is uncomprehending, and her brow furrows because who cares what does that mean eat it quick I offered didn't I?_

"Are you trying to save my soul?" _he asks, looking for the loophole, the fancy light tricks, the hidden trap door._

_Alexandria doesn't understand._

"Are you trying to save – "

She sobs, and therein lies the conviction, like she would have grabbed him by the shirt if she could have. "No. Mine, too."

_Alexandria._

* * *

And so, there are men like Sinclair. And for one brilliant moment, Roy was a Shadow, Roy was _God._

And people made their own stories, people _decided _their fate. When Roy brought that little girl into the story, she became his daughter, small and dependent on him – when he did that, he took up the mantle, the duty, of care, of responsibility for what would happen; he'd made the story theirs. Ain't nothing to it.

Sinclair was an asshole; he got the girl, he got the charm, he got the glory. But he was only a villain because Roy spun him as one, Roy _let_ him become his nemesis; Roy was the one who tortured himself, because no one else gave the right to Sinclair to make him feel like a washed-out nobody if it wasn't Roy.

So, when he got out of that nunnery of a hospital, still unsteady on his feet, he'd gotten better because he'd wanted to. Alexandria had healed up, and was probably going back to what she'd been doing before, picking oranges. And Roy had to live by example and survive. He healed; not brand new, not enough to do the crazier stunts like he used to, but enough to suffice – he still had that daredevil genius in him, on his side.

Robin, one-legged and pirate, with his little dog, comes to pick Roy up from the hospital. He's a good man, and he's...he's Roy's _friend_. He's still working on movies, gag stunts and such, and it's admirable how a man at his age can still find work in the business. Roy is chagrined, won over, and there are a few more movies the man is working on currently; he's friendly with the directors and Robin says he can let Roy back on set, if Roy would like to watch, just to get back into the swing of things and Roy Walker appreciates this – it feels like a warm soldier's handshake when Robin takes him by the hand. It sends a deep slow spreading ease through his bones, a feeling very much like relief.

He goes back to the shoot, teetering on crutches and watching the progress, smiling a little bit too wide and maybe a little bit too crazy at the stuntmen. It helps the healing process, he wants to get better; and maybe he makes a suggestion here or there, and he helps out. He's not dead. Not yet. He's just gearing up for the next jump, the next spectacular leap. There's a little money from it, and during the months recuperating out of the hospital Roy slums it up in cheap motels, or when his pride feels flexible enough he'll stay at Robin's house. Up and Down. Here and There.

He doesn't know if he feels a little free – or if he should. His cage is built around him, has wheels 'round the bottom; arms outspread, it moves with him.

And he is trapped in the fingers of a child, held up against his brow and kissing him.

* * *

_I fell again._

_I heard. Everybody's heard. You're famous._

_Are they angry?_

_Yeah. But not at you._

* * *

"Roy." Robin sits out on the porch; it's three o'clock in the morning and Roy stumbles down the garden path, two buttons missing off his shirt. At the sound of the old man's voice he's stopped like a deer in headlights – he's been caught coming back late like a teenager who tries to sneak back home past curfew. Drunk off his ass, sweating tequila. He doesn't know why he drinks, he just does. And old habits die hard. "Sit down."

He pats the wooden planks next to him, disgruntled and eyes no-nonsense.

Roy dumps his jacket, kicks off his shoes and he's a man emerging from an ocean, working unsteady feet on the swaying shore. Slumping next to the pirate, skipping the mental processes of thought and thinking nothing until he hears the sound…?

Like pebbles in a jar, clacking around glass walls when shaken.

His…pills.

"You can't take these anymore," Robin mutters once he's sure the bottle in his hand has the young man's attention. "You have to stop."

Roy scratches the stubble on his jaw, laces his fingers across his mouth and gives a very hoarse chuckle. It's mirthless, self-deprecating. "Where did you…"

"This is my house; I have every right to check. And I'm worried about you."

"You shouldn't be," Roy says almost brightly, and knows he's not very convincing. "I only take enough for the occasional pains, only once in a while, I wouldn't lie to you, Robin – it's once in a while, a blue moon; honest."

Robin sighs, like the oldest willow tree creaking against a breeze, weighed down with age. "These are bad for you – you remember, you almost… She could have died…for you and these stupid things…"

"How could I forget?"

"Those are my conditions, Roy."

"To stay at your place?"

"No." The old man is as sober as Roy is drunk. "To stay your friend."

He dumps his chin into his slackened hands and rocks sideways and back, drunk and thoughtful. "You drive a hard bargain; I should have known, you Italians –"

"Roy, my parents are Irish, you know that –"

"No, you, you shut up; _I'm_ the leader, _I'm _the hero – that's…that's my Achilles heel; I _need _them, you know, Luigi?" He looks up, beseeching and not completely tame. "I need them; it's not so hard these days. I'm not sick. But sometimes…_sometimes I can't sleep_, and I need them to sleep – "

Robin is balding, and sick to the stomach with drunken ravings, but he shakes his head. "You don't need them, Roy. You only tell yourself you do."

He goes quiet at this; numb fingers pinch his nose, mop at his brow. There's an agitation in him building up, building up. "I could never forget, you know that, right? What it was all for, her listening to me…I _used_ her…"

"It all ended well, so it's fine."

"No, it didn't," he snaps loudly, as drunk people do. Pitches his words using his outside voice and flails with bitterness. "It _didn't_ end well. Maybe for me, I'm learning better – but she's not, she's back to picking oranges, our situations didn't change; I'll never _see_ her again. I _told_ her, Robin, she's so _stupid_, but so am I, I for telling her, and she for believing otherwise because I _told_ her…there aren't any happy endings, not with me."

"Roy – "

"And that's the problem. I can't sleep _thinking_ that, that it _never _changed – and I think of it all the time, she's gap-toothed and giggling in my dreams, five years old and much _much_ smarter than me… Sometimes in my dreams she goes back to picking oranges, and she falls again, and she breaks something other than her arm; sometimes it's her legs, her spine… I let her live the stories, live _in_ them, and I think I was right to tell them to her; kids like stories, you know? I want to go back to being a Bandit, to kidnapping the princess, to wondrous fantasy; but I can't _do_ that – I_ can't _want_ that_, because somewhere she might be suffering for it, for making her think that the world is a great fantastic fucking place when it's a dump. I'm not a hero anymore, I don't deserve to be; I'm not a hero and I can't delude myself and go back to that. Every time I close my eyes I think of deserts and elephants and whirling dervishes…so I need sleep, _dreamless_ sleep; so I need those pills…" He is raving; stark raving mad, overwhelmed. "Would she think any less of me? I don't depend on the pills, I just need them once in a while, to not dream, a little; you know what that's like…"

There's something no one except Robin knows about Roy, though everyone assumes the opposite of the truth on the subject. Robin knows Roy never fought in the war; not like the Americans in 1917, his brothers, his countrymen clashing with German soldiers on the Merne river when their great country joined the offensive. Robin couldn't either, because he only had one leg. But Roy was making movies, and he never went, though he wanted to – oh _God_, had he wanted to. But Roy was afraid of _dying_, he'd told Robin one evening, drunk as a skunk, as he was now; at least in stunts he had a say, he knew when it would come, he could meet the ground halfway on a fall – but on the battlefield…bullets fly, and it catches you off your feet, death; it's sudden, and not on your own terms. That made him a coward, a head-down and finger-crossing coward. He never could forget, and he regretted it – war would have been grand in a sense; but he couldn't die that way, and he couldn't serve his country and Robin called him a _college man._

"So, you won't move forward, because you assume she can't?" he demands, exasperated and angry. "What kind of dumbass notion is that?"

"I don't know." He mops at his glistening eyes. "I don't know."

"Roy, you're already her hero – you made a promise to that girl, I don't quite know what the hell you mean by elephants and all that babble, but it seems you have an obligation to that kid. _Hero?_ You have to set a goddamn example; so, you never see her again, s_o what?_ You _see _this?" And he rattles the morphine hard and vicious, cocking the lid against Roy's temple like a gun barrel. "This will be the end of you. You make too many assumptions on the state of things in other places; you have no control over what happens to her now, so _fine_. But you have control over your life, so get your damn act together – _be_ the hero, live up to those words, don't talk the talk and chicken on the walk. Don't be a coward, _you don't have the excuse anymore._ And if you loved that little girl enough, you'll _know_ she put faith in you – so stop talking gibberish, and stand up, get up, and _man_ up!"

"…I can't just change, old man."

"You can't know," Robin hisses, "if you won't even try."

* * *

In the end, he lines up all his bottles on the bathroom sink, rolls up his sleeve and – he can't…he just can't.

He needs and gets Robin's help to flush it all down the toilet; the old man directs him like Roy's a limb-numb child again, like he's helping a blind man across the street, emptying all his pills into the bowl.

Then the old man gives him a packet of cigarettes and says he'll teach Roy how to smoke. It won't be the same. But it will get better.

* * *

_Not the time to sleep, now. Not the time to sleep. Wake up. Wake up, it's not the time to sleep now. Wake up._

_Don't pretend to sleep. Wake up. Not the time to sleep now, Roy!_

* * *

_He can't win. That's because our Masked Bandit is a coward. Yeah. He never took an oath, he's a fake. He's a liar and a coward. _

_You're lying._

_No. He had his fingers crossed. He has to die._

_I don't believe you._

_He's dying._

_Don't kill him._

_There's nothing left for him._

_His daughter._

_He wasn't her father, either._

_She loves him._

_She'll survive; she's young._

_I don't want you to die. Roy. Don't kill him. Let him live. Let him live. Don't kill him. Roy?_

_…_

_Promise? And don't cross your fingers._

_…_

_…Promise._

_Show me your hands._

_…_

_…_

_…See?_

* * *

One evening, he takes his beat-up old car down the boulevard with the cover down. 1933; Prohibition is over. The stars glitter like sparse and far-off jewels; his legs work fine, work the automobile past gold-gilded pavement and emblazoned letters, past the names and the billboards and down to an old bar-and-grill, just out of the way. He wears sunglasses, perched up in his wind-rattled hair, slings his jacket off and takes the walk into the bar, feeling the liberty of his own steps; he can do it. California heat burning the back of his neck when he orders a drink, perspiration on his forehead good-natured and real, condensation pooling down around the bottom of his glass on the coaster.

There's a woman, of all things, sitting on the counter top – young, polka dot skirt and painted red lips. Her skin is dark, and she talks sweetly to him, in smooth unbroken English.

He's charmed and frustrated by the imprint of memory he can place onto her, trying to find the little nuances. Like a game.

Her accent is vaguely Southern, and her English good; colloquial, though – no older than sixteen, fluttering her painted curled-up eyelashes at the boys posturing by the jukebox. At that age, bold and a little bit stupid, endearing maybe. She's looking for a man to buy her a drink like most girls are; he doesn't ask what she's doing out on a weeknight, her skin is dark and her eyes are foolish-bright and Roy buys her a drink which he knows is off his conscience for having too much ice and not enough kick.

"Why, sir… You're a _gentleman_?"

He laughs into his glass, almost chokes. He's a Bandit. A few years ago, in dirty sheets without strength to go to the bathroom down the hall. But now, he's a gentleman, and he thinks of Bandits and his Bandit Daughter and imagines her too wise to turn this way should she reach the age, too wise for boys and jukeboxes; that her head will always be filled with elephants trekking through Mediterranean waters, blade-spinning Indians and princess-stealing Bandits. It must be so. Alexandria with her serious eyes, yet who giggled at everything he said; who wanted to know his story, who _saved_ him.

And the girl at least has that much in common with Alexandria – she giggles too much, though flirtatiously and out of her league, because he's older. And he's looking for his Bandit Daughter in her kohled eyes, and he smiles slow and almost sleepy-happy, safe.

"No, no," he says, and she sips her drink. Ladylike with booze, fashionable to the disgusting bite of it. "Never that." She laughs, high and distracting. It makes Roy want to laugh, too; this dumb youth. Not wise like Alexandria, who he will never see again.

"Smile for me," he tells her. His eyes are soft, and her cheeks heat up at the sudden sentimentality of his gaze, the lingering _offness;_ she can't put a finger on it, but it's flattering and disconcerting and she does. She smiles wide and flawless.

Her hair, held back in yellow ribbons, is curled in tight little ringlets; black and gleaming – not wild and errant, flying from braids. Her English is flawless, copes with the rising culture; she has no accent, no broken hesitation in her phrases. Roy puts the money down for both their drinks, gets up and pats her head like a father...tall and overwhelming, a safety blanket. She is not Alexandria; the nostalgia feels like the slow blue ache of autumn rain, and it's California. He will never see Alexandria again; it kills him a little, makes his fingers twitch for a cigarette to drive the pills from his mind.

Her smile is too white, too even.

He won't ever see Alexandria again; it's impossible. Not unlike a fairytale, where nemeses meet on old dusty roads, or lovers and brothers are reunited after several years, it can't _turn_ that way, and he'd be a bit stupid to hope for it. His fingers twitch, and he thinks of the pills flushed down the toilet, and he has a pack of smokes in his shirt pocket, to drive the thought of pills away…it's alright to dream about Alexandria; Robin said it was alright.

And this girl...she wasn't his gap-toothed Bandit Daughter; and Roy can only imagine Alexandria, grown in these few intervening years into a memory apart from himself, a sweet dream.

He gets back into his car, drives back to home and Robin's study. It's still early in the night; he filches an old faulty biro and a sheet of corporate movie studio printed paper…and he writes.

* * *

They work on another movie together; a damsel-in-distress, burning-building scenario. Roy is excited about this one, it's dangerous; it sets his mouth in a grim line and his heart running at a thousand paces a minute.

He'll be working with Sinclair again; it's a year since he came out of hospital and the star looks as smooth as ever, as untouchable. He smiles at Roy when the director gathers them together, but Roy only nods in greeting, because he frankly doesn't give a damn. No one is going to hold his hand. He's lost everything; but he's alive now, he has nothing to lose – and he already defeated Governor Odious in his head, and he realized what an underwhelming villain he was, gleaming cufflinks and smooth smirks and all.

Roy is his Shadow again. He does his job.

In the days that follow, _She _visits the shoot. The first time he sees her, after so long – after she betrayed him, left him for Odious (Sinclair) – he's surprised, a little unprepared; she's in red, a button-up blouse and a long skirt, standing by Sinclair's trailer. He remembers the flare of her hips, the sweetness of her mouth; how she'd cry and manage to look so pretty doing it, like Roy was some damn moviemaker, like he was worse, a member of the audience to cater to her and revere her. Because he'd been _sure _they were written in the stars; the rising actress falling for the invisible stuntman, like a princess running off with a Bandit, a street rat. But she was nothing but a ragdoll, who _fooled_ him, made a mockery of love...and deserted him. He'd worshipped her.

Her eyes widen; she holds a hand to her mouth, says _Oh, my...Roy. Roy...!_ The tears come, on cue, glisten in phony purity and perfection; her kid-gloved hands clutch his arm, her cloying perfume smells like strawberries and something noxious and dizzying. She is bad for him, like opium; she drugs him and deceives him and he'll have no part of it, not anymore.

She's desperate, and she takes his face in her lily hands when he turns away. Beseeches him, not to love her, but to _believe_ her – because she's an actress, isn't she?

She is close enough to kiss, and he could have. Oh, Roy would have. He's a stuntman; he has survived fires and falls, tumbles and bullets, and slighting a man like Sinclair by kissing his woman would hardly be frightening. _Sinclair's_ _woman_, the words spill like ash across his brain, _once was mine_. _Poor man, Rich man, Poor man, Rich –_ but like a Shadow, Roy only wears the skin of another man; he's the double, the behind-the-scenes man, the takes-a-bullet-and-dies man – and, truth is, he and Sinclair are probably in the same boat, tied to a woman so grossly unreliable, a deserter, that he _pities_ the day Sinclair is bedridden or a calamity befalls him; because starlets flee whenever they suspect the shine is lacking and...he _should have known_...in the end, the princess is fickle and false and he won't fall for it again.

She's expecting him to steer her behind the trailer and kiss her senseless, maybe; to burn down in defeat and prostrate himself before her in love – because that's what happened in the movies; wicked women were forgiven and once more became saints. She does not expect him to shrug her off, pry her fingers from his face, and laugh at her. The laugh of an adult to a stupid child, distrustful and uncaring.

"Oh, darling," he tells her, smile lopsided, roguish, "you're a fool."

He doesn't look back.

* * *

There's really something about California that Roy couldn't imagine being without; the air there, the weather, it's hot and burning, from the matted humid air of a traffic jam to the crisp clean bite the ocean breeze along the coast takes from your lungs. Everything is vibrant, bright and burning, from the sharp green of grass that must be kept wet lest it dry and crackle into flame, to the coast that's blue and blinding when the light glances off the waves. Money feels hot in your palm; crisp dollar bills smoking along the edges, coins branding your insides like silver, like magic bullets.

Funnily enough, you can feel both hate and love for it.

His shirt sticks to his back; it's six years since his accident. He takes off his hat, mops his forehead with the back of his hand; squints against a sunrise.

Sometimes, these days, he has the odd longing for the bittersweet of oranges.

* * *

It's twelve years later; he doesn't look it, but he's thirty-five now. He's making his way out of Hollywood, _there isn't much need for an old stuntman, and thirty-five is dinosaur years_ he tells Robin with a grin, small and lopsided; he doesn't have a wooden leg to go on with gags like Robin did. And the older man raises his sherry in a toast to this, having fast gotten out of the business a few years ago.

For a stuntman, his face has been left unmarred; women find him lucky in that respect. He still has a smooth, clean-planed face, or, at least, so the last girl told him; and he shaves every day. His hair hasn't thinned and he smiles; he's thirty-five whether or not he looks it. His body is lean, _almost too lean _Robin grunts, eyes rheumy and laugh lines digging at their edges. The dog is still alive; just as old as Robin, with its sleepy head laid against Roy's boot and Roy scratches its wobbly side almost absentmindedly.

Roy writes.

Nothing too spectacular, mind. Just little articles, here and there; stories – some have been published in magazines under appropriate pseudonyms, some (like the tale of the evil Governor and the princess; the five men, the Bandit and his Bandit Daughter) he penned down and kept in the back of his drawer, private and an homage to the past. Too precious to share for money. He thumbs paper, and pours out words thick like dictionary ink, and there are new cuts on his fingers, writer's callouses; little tinier scars. For he can't stand typewriters; they jar him, and send horses thundering through his head.

Roy writes. He's surprised, himself, that he does. But it feels right, it feels like it's what he should be doing; he'd been doing it since the accident, since the little girl…and he hasn't stopped. As a stuntman it feels right, because he sets up the action in the movies for the moviemakers, he's the invisible spine of the show, the Shadow...and as a writer, he's an invisible God; he makes the story, the elements all connecting and correct. It is empowering, it is benign; it feels grounded after the fall.

* * *

Of all the places, of all the silly places to meet her – it's in a library; undramatic as it may be, underwhelming it is not. He didn't recognize her at first; just a pretty young thing with hair tucked up in a no-nonsense bun, and a pert little nose buried in the latest issue of a cowboy graphic novel. She wears reading glasses, rimmed blue, and his heart stutters to a stop by her chair, palm glancing off the polished wooden surface of the table, and she looked up impatiently, at his terrified wonderful eyes because he asked very suddenly why...why wasn't she supposed to be picking oranges.

Her eyes flash with anger, that spirit he knows so well. She opens her mouth to snap him clean in two and then her jaw slackens. "Oh," she says when they lock eyes. "_Oh!_"

And he's shaking, smiling and grinning madly when his mind floats away from him and she gaily screams near to take the roof off the building, and without further ado launches herself at him. "Roy! Oh, Roy! It is you!" She's giddy and taller, still small though; and she remembers him – she remembers him. Her weight jolts him, slight as she is, and he's laughing; his fingers brush the little curls at the nape of her neck, he's smoothing the hair away from her face. "I cannot believe – " she claps her hand over her mouth to silence herself, but her clear moss-gray eyes (long-lashed below a slightly sculpted brow; no more baby fat) are alight with something he knows all too well when she points to the 'Quiet' sign above their heads, and hushes him – had her eyes always been like this, the dust motes gold around them? Now she whispers to him. "It _is_ you."

"Alexandria the Great," he says, and she grins and he wonders when she got so, so...? "I thought you'd forgotten."

She snaps her fingers and crosses her heart, whispers like they're thick as thieves; a blood oath. "Never."

Something in his chest clicks into place, when she one-handedly tosses her book shut and, managing to drag him between the aisles, she orders him, quite simply, to walk.

He raises his arms, rolls his eyes and takes his steps forward and backward. "Fully functioning," he tells her wryly, and her eyes are glassy-wet when she laughs.

* * *

"I see you." Later, they are sitting on the wide front steps of the building; her legs folded underneath her, skirt covering her knees. Picture-perfect propriety. She must be seventeen now. Roy is still adjusting; he can't take his eyes off her. She is so very new. "Every time I go to the movies, I was seeing you in your stunts; and I watch many movies many, many times to make sure it is you."

He clucks his tongue, arms on his knees and his back against the steps. "Why'd you do that?"

"Well," she murmurs, then laughs awkwardly when she brushes a strand of hair behind her ear. "I thought Mamma lied to me, maybe, that you are fixed...sometimes I think I imagined seeing you, because that would be easier."

"I'm sorry," he says, not knowing exactly what he's apologizing for; but knowing that there is something he feels sorry for, painfully so.

"Don't say that." Alexandria smiles. "I liked watching you."

"You're a very silly girl, Alexandria." He reaches over to ruffle her hair, like he would a child's, because she's Alexandria. Except that doesn't quite work anymore; she ducks his hand and laughs, pokes him under the eye almost hard enough to blind him.

"I never forget," she says, while he's still recovering – her accent is still there, thick and rolling, but no longer difficult to understand; her wording is still raw. It makes him wonder. "About the stories. You always told them the best."

"I'm glad." Roy doesn't think he can say much more, except… "You're still a Bandit?"

"Of course!" she says, and giggles. Still the same Alexandria, always giggling at whatever he said, lighting him up from the inside, making firecrackers go off in his head. "Oh, but I do not pick oranges anymore, since you were asking before. I work in the city now. It is better, no? Odd jobs here and there, a maid and these things...Mamma let me; doctor warned her about my falling, so she give me permission to come to the city. I make enough money to send back home, and after work I go to the movies. Or the library, like now. What about you, Roy?"

Roy, Roy, Roy; she's always saying his name. He wonders if it's etched into her heart, like hers is into his. _Roy._

_Alexandria._

"Stunts," he says.

It's late afternoon; the steps are red like ripe tangerines and cast her face half in light, half in dusk, but her smile is always there. She's slim, slender in a way that reminds him of the wispy branches of the trees back home, stealing into farms and palming apples, bruising his knees; and yet she holds herself with her own custom-made dignity, spirited yet grinning, like the days when she would have ripped her grubby note from his hands that first time they'd met, like today laughing at him, like her smiling against his elbow on a dusty old hospital mattress, throwing orange peels at his head.

Alexandria.

"Have you fallen any of this time recently?" she demands of him, looking him over like it's her responsibility. She doesn't like lying, and he won't, not to her.

"Just a few stumbles, here...and there."

"Here and there?" she echoes doubtfully, but in good heart.

"Yes," he smiles; and then she turns to her side, digs through her satchel for a sheet of paper and a pencil. She looks like a schoolgirl, rather than a librarian. She should let down her hair, it would frame her lovely heart-shaped face so beautifully; he can't call that the face of a child anymore, her lips are too full and her mouth curved so, those blue-gray-brown eyes of hers he'd thought of as mocha clearly shine like the colour of dusty jewels of an exotic species. He couldn't name them. She scribbles on the sheet, tears it off and leans close, pulls his hand towards her; he lets her. Her skin is warm against his, her fingers long and graceful, soft but not fanciful; they are deliberate when she pries open his unresisting fingers and places the paper there, presses it into his palm like a piece of the Church's consecrated bread; holy. It feels like a kiss, and she tells him:

"This is my address, alright?"

He opens his mouth to query, but she smiles beneficently and pats his hand; then she folds his fingers over the paper, safekeeping keepsakes. "I stay with an old family friend, she...saves letter for me," and then abruptly she stops, ears colouring red (or maybe…he can't tell if it's her, him, or the fall of the orange sun that paints the blush on her cheeks), starts haltingly, "Though you don't have to write, Roy. This is just in case – "

"I could walk you home."

"No, no; I am not to go home now," she replies, like she's the adult here. She had the habit of using that tone once in a while, back then. "I have, 'nother shift, somewhere else."

_I could wait,_ he wants to say, _I've been waiting all these years, I could wait._ But Alexandria lays her hand on his cheek, between a pinch and a pat, and kisses the skin under his eye, on his scar; it's all very chaste – and her lips are soft there… His eyes flutter shut for a moment; and then she withdraws, smiles at him plain as day, without fallacy, stands up with the sun at her back. He dreams of horses, and blue cities sweltering under a desert sky, the scattering of lotus petals, and Alexandria. The sun against her hair…she looks like she's burning, burning like a city at night, like citrus; burning California.

She's gone before he can catch his breath.

* * *

He goes home, back to Robin who'd told him many times that he couldn't _do_ gag stunts. _I've had my leg chewed off by savages, sawed off by criminals; even had a harpoon through it. You can't do gag stunts. Gags are not for you, Roy. You're a _college man_._

Roy smiles, thumbs his paper, writes a letter to Alexandria. Except it's not that simple – he feels like he's writing a letter to a country, a piece of his soul, his self; and it becomes more than just one letter...it's papers among papers of stories, pages clipped together and bound in an envelope. Which he promptly rips in half and crumples into the trash.

He can't give her stories; she's a woman now, a young lady with slender wrists, and his hand feels more appropriate resting on the small of her back than patting her on the head and Roy tears his fingers through his hair in agitation. If he sends her stories, he might love her. He can't.

So, he writes other things – about the movies he's been in, his rather stranger stunts; about his childhood in LA, breaking fire hydrants and dancing in their splash, stealing into vineyards.

He sends them…and thinks he might love her still.

_I buried the old man's teeth in an orange skin; it is in a field now, I like thinking that it has been growing...the Indian on the farm had been asking if maybe the orange tree that would grow up there from it might be having teeth! Remember what you tell me that time, Roy? That the spirit strength is in the teeth, the man's soul, that's why he put it in a glass by his bed every night. I do not remember much, only that he was very kind to me; and in my dreams he was the Mystic…and in my dreams, Roy, you were always the hero. The Masked Bandit._

Her lettering is painstakingly neat – not like his, which is like the etches of a knife scrawling against wood; deeply cut, clumsy, haphazard. Between her bad grammar and his handwriting, they are a match.

And he writes back, almost always promptly with other anecdotes. He dares not speak a word about how she saved him, because if he starts he doesn't think he'll stop, and it's a dangerous road from there.

_You're seventeen now, aren't you? You write well; I'm impressed._

And even in her letters, on paper, he hears her laugh; feels her smile against his skin. Wonders if she smells like citrus.

* * *

Letters don't cut it, and Roy all but camps out at the library these days hoping to catch sight of her. On a Thursday his efforts are rewarded, and he corners her for coffee. An open café with little tables; she's impressed, but not overawed. She has her pride – Roy doesn't let her pay for anything and she almost throws a fit over it. Instead, she huffs and spreads apart the plates and the tea to place a tin rectangular box onto the table; it's old and rusted along the edges, a long time ago it might have been used to keep chocolates.

"Look," she tells him, and she opens the box. Draws out paper cuttings and paper-mâché masks, crayoned drawings and silly little oddities. He knows that box. "Remember?"

He picks up the mask, by its strings first; almost reverently, carefully – careful now. He can't be blamed if his fingers tremble.

"See!" she crows. Her white dress clashes horribly with her click-clacking flat red shoes…and all of a sudden, this girl-child, he knows she's his – she must be; and he's hers. It can't be any other way; after all, she's carried his soul with her for so long, how could it be otherwise?

His mouth feels dry, he swallows back a choke of air, and asks her; like that time before, when it wasn't her. Breathes deep and fluttering. "Smile for me?"

* * *

_You remember a lot for someone who was very young then._

_You cried for me, too._

* * *

He takes his beat-up old car down the street, blinks at the paper in his hand at intervals, turns the wheel and goes down unfamiliar roads and crossings. The streets are tighter, with buildings stacked clumsily over each other; it's a dusty old urban neighbourhood that speaks of immigrants and lower-level income. There are few trees, and even his ugly automobile looks pleasant when contrasted with the surroundings he now navigates through. Soon enough, the streetlights turn on; show up the sidewalks in murky light, and make the fire escape railings shine like sticks of licorice.

He stops the car a little off to one side of the road, one wheel climbing the pavement so he is tilted on a slight angle. Roy thumbs up his sunglasses to peek at the six-story building sandwiched between what looks to be a kosher butcher's shop with rosaries stretched across the door frame and a liquor store where a loan shark squats, coughing, against a lamppost. Eyes turn to sweep over him, curious. The American has come forth on a four-wheeled mystery to where nary a one of their kind dares to venture. Roy Walker is not from a rich family; he spent his childhood in other people's groves – not working, mind, but stealing oranges for sport, cutting his palms on sharply playful branches, early callouses to compliment future ones. Hs father had owned a vineyard, his mother was a Scottish woman born and raised in New York – yet he has known little else but the Californian sun, and its magnificent heat. He was well loved, went to college to amuse himself, learnt architecture and agriculture. Drank his fill and skipped out on the war. Learnt how to be the ghost in those brilliant, brilliant moving pictures. Not even college sounded pretty after that. And Roy had been very good at almost dying, each and every time.

Two boys with branches, rolling cans across the pavement for play, stop by his car; curious and awed by the man with the sunglasses. He rolls down the window and opens the door to put his legs out. Talks to them and listens to their accented questions about his car; their excitement is catching. It's an old car, they reason. He agrees. Why don't you sell it? No, I can't do that. This car is like my family. Eh? It's old, mister. Just like me. You have a dog, kid? No. Got a cat, though. If your cat got old, would you put it down? What do you mean, mister? Put it down, put it to sleep. Sell it. Would you? Well, no, mister. See, exactly. No, no, mister. That's different, you can't compare a cat and a car. It's different. How's it different? Just is.

He asks, gives his best attempt at a Hollywood smile, "Is there a girl called Alexandria who lives in that house?"

They look at him, suddenly somewhat hostile, suspicious and warning. "Maybe. The landlady would know."

"I knew her when she was a kid; did you know?" He eases them up with a smile, "She had gapped teeth. You can't tell now, but she really did have gapped teeth; and she was so small, just about your age."

It works. "How do you know the Romanian girl?"

"We both fell," he says. "And, so, we were in the same hospital. I used to tell her stories."

"How'd you fall, mister?"

"I used to be a stuntman," and that had them all types of starry-eyed and crowing, asking him if he knew Charlie Chaplin. "Once; a swell guy, that Charlie."

"You're not her boyfriend?"

Roy opens his mouth, hesitates –

"The landlady don't like that type of business; she's an old-fashioned Jewish broad. One of the girls there had a tom; he used to sneak in, and he'd always get caught. She's mighty crazy."

And then a gasp, the open-and-close of a faulty iron gate…and Alexandria in her slippers. A long shift that covers her skin and gives a little glimpse of nothing but her hands. For the first time in his life, she's speechless. Rendered so only momentarily, of course. "Roy!" she exclaims, tucking her dressing gown around her shift and pattering down to his car. "What are you...?"

He is suddenly very cautious; has he made a mistake, somehow? Did he misread an invitation?

The paper with her address catches her eye, and she comes forward to shoo the two boys away. They grumble, and are off. "Oh, Roy!"

"Am I making trouble for you?" he worries.

"She is not here right now, the landlady." She cracks a grin, over the shock. "I did not expect you."

"Is she strict much?"

"She is from Romania, like my parents. Very...old-fashioned. However," she tastes the word; her mind has been eager for all sorts of words these years, "she has gone in, for synagogue prayers this night; she will be back soon."

"I'm sorry."

"You could not have known."

He stands up from his car, averts his eyes. Her hair is down, he notices; it curls around her shoulders in wisps of heavy brown like languorous smoke twirls too heavy to be carried easily by the wind. Thick, like the kerosene smoke that rolled from the smudge pots and kept the oranges from freezing on cold nights. Kept them alive… He should not look at her so directly. "I'd like to be with you, sometimes; take out you to the park."

Her face lights up, her skin dark and smooth with summer. No Helen could rival. "I work very much – "

"But you're free, sometimes. Right?"

"Hm. Landlady will never throw me out – she is relative."

"Oh." He stands a little straighter; makes the mistake of meeting her bright, bright eyes and falling in love with her all over again. "Can I drive you around, once in a while, Alexandria?"

"Only on Saturdays," she says, looking askance at him from beneath her lashes; bashful, almost. "Is it alright?"

"It is. It's perfect."

* * *

Dangling off the edge of a precipice, holding on by ribbons of green silk, a masked man in hakama careens through the air…then leaps. A burning God, a magnificent hero; falling, flying through cinder-strewn air. Drops to the ground from perilous heights, lands – on his feet like a cat, on an Aegean hot day; insurmountable, undefeated, her victor. Talks to her in tongues strangers could never understand; her wonderful conqueror. Bandit.

Alexandria, who sleeps on the tide of cars riding down the dark roads, plaits her hair between shifts of working hours, slips on her business-brown hose and watches the pavement; longing for the breeze that will arrive and occasionally snatch up newspapers and, once or twice, like a familiar friend, pull on the edges of her straight-laced shirt, her braids. Her days are in a colour none but she could imagine, and few in the world, no, not even prophets, could convey – in the train, there is the flash of Mediterranean blue, like an ocean city in cool shadow, and in the fruit stalls every Wednesday she smiles at the red of strawberries like the blood red oath on the Indian's forehead who was so silly-looking in his blindfold; she carries cardamom and vanilla in her satchel, imagines doves on the railing of her fire escape. She is a stilted child, surviving on snippets of dreams in an adult's life. Peter Pan has nothing on her.

Roy once tells her that she makes him feel like a child.

They're at one of the parks; the big-laked one, with the imported trees from somewhere in Asia, he mentioned, that in spring are supposed to burst into a profusion of pink flowers. At the moment, her hair is still wisping out from her bun (no braids today) on her free Saturday because Roy's car was a top-down old one, and the wind rushed through. It made her face numb. Like a smile. His lanky, long-panted legs are propped on the rise of a tree root; his head pillowed by his folded jacket, a hat on his chest. Like Huckleberry Finn.

"You laugh so much, you smile so much," he explains, in that way of his. "You must know some secret of this world that I don't – to be so at peace with it. Am I wrong?" And then his eyes are alert and almost panicky; looking up at her, frantic and almost lost, for reassurance. "You are happy, Alexandria. Aren't you?"

Most older men who are with young women, even not in that way – they seem old. But Roy doesn't even seem young, he looks at her with such eyes. He is not caught in the folly of an old man who tries to reclaim lost bygone years through a pretty ornament by his side; he doesn't even have gray in his hair. His eyes are so trusting, so searching, so curious – they could swallow her whole, in their near-feverish concentration. And he too much enjoys the climbing of trees and the telling of stories to seem anything but a child when he has such _eyes._

He is like he was in the hospital. He relies on her. He is her responsibility. His temples are framed by his hair, brown and thick to run fingers through; he looks boyishly endearing when he drives with his glasses tucked back in that hair, sometimes. But his skin is sun-warm, tanned slightly; like a man's. A roman nose, having been once or twice broken and set with his own hand, possibly. The silver of a scar beneath his eye. His large, warm hands. A straightforward laugh. The burning need to be oh-so-honest; his eyes.

"Are you not?" she challenges in return, a lilt of a smile in that same tone she was so well known for in her youth.

"You are?" He presses on.

"Yes; I work, I meet Roy again. Why not be happy?"

She lifts the basket onto her lap, and concentrates on peeling the oranges she has brought, because his eyes are too much like helpless gratitude, and even she could not look into that and stand stoic, unwavering. Oranges are familiar, like the grove on the outskirts of town she is saving up money with her sister to buy, perhaps, someday. For Mother. In memory of Father.

She has them separated in slices and pieces; so good with a knife. She passes him a plate of them, the nice-looking plate that she normally keeps polished in the glass cupboard with all her best (and meagre) silverware, but she took out into the sun for Roy. The grass tickles the skin lining the creases of the backs of her knees, her skirt is folded neatly over bare legs; she did not wear stockings today because it was a holiday, and she needed the feel of the green.

"I thought maybe you would hate me," he says in the heart of a confession, when he sits up and his shoulder brushes hers against the tree trunk, as they sit side by side.

She is surprised, beyond words. He fills in the gaps; explains, after a pause. "You see, I told you stories of an idyll; a paradise. And you were only a child. I made you believe in beautiful things; adventures, heroes, magic and daring – I thought if you believed in them so strongly, only to realize that they were only fantasy; that all of it was a lie – "

"It was not a lie."

He looks at her. His eyes are the cold colour of gray rivers running, widening into the crystal sea. Even today, he still reminds her somewhat of a destroyed forest, the rippling stillness of water; the stillness of lonely thought.

"You can't always live in stories, Alexandria."

"Why not?"

He frowns. She'd said that a little forcefully, louder than she normally would; with mouth almost severe and eyes no-nonsense. "Because life is not a fairytale; reality is harsh. And the stories were a brief reprieve, like a magician's show. It's an illusion. Paupers do not turn into princes overnight; there are no princesses, no bands of supermen ready to fight evil – and when you realize that... Why don't you hate me? I have not been with you, all these years. I as good as abandoned you. I didn't save you."

She shakes her head, and wipes her orange juice-covered palms on the grass. Looks up at him, with a small smile at his confusion, wiser than he will ever be. His Athena. Leans a little on his shoulder, cheek on his arm. "Silly Roy."

He closes his eyes; when she glances up at him from this angle, rested against him, he is even more handsome.

"Silly Roy." Fingers against the sleeve of his shirt. She has missed this; it has been so long since the days spent in that hospital room cast in perpetual half-light, with his head lolled and sleeping right next to hers. "You are always the hero, of course you are real. Never doubt it."

How could she love him, otherwise?

* * *

_No; you should ask someone else. There's no happy ending with me._

_I still want to hear it._

* * *

The science – or, rather, the motivation – behind his life with Alexandria is simpler than Roy understands it to be. It is peppered with guilt, and gratitude, and such desperate anguished longing that it could not help but reverberate through the core and marrow of his bones. His heart.

He remembers the time before; the table they'd set her down on, her bandaged head as she lay still as any corpse. He'd bitten his nails 'til he worried them to the quick and tore his skin; and when he could finick no further with his fingers, he fouled his mouth with liquor and dredged up the guilt 'til it was a knife in his gut, wrenching upwards and slitting his throat with a grief and hate for himself he could not bear. For he was such a man – such a fake God, to have taken a girl's love for her father and used it to his own means, tricked her with M-O-R-P-H-I-N-3, consciously done so – and she was so pale under the tube lighting. So still. He feared her dead. Dead so young and he so wretched.

He'd enchanted her, bewitched her – lied to her. Weaved stories as liars do. Used her. Captivated her with light tricks and mirror illusions, spun a fantasy that could not be.

He wants to tell her the exact number of stars there are in the sky, the place the moon goes to when the sun rises, every love story, all the choruses of the ditties the songbirds trill by the lake; grant her more than a dreamer's heart – brilliant, stronger.

It is simple, really. Now that he knows her again, a second time. He wants to give her the ending she needs – as he had taken from her.

He wants to give her everything.

* * *

He's a thirty-six-year-old man now, she's eighteen; it isn't right. "Nineteen, I turned last month." She speaks. "I do not look it, no? …What was your question?"

Roy has a spoon fiddled 'round in his fingers, and his mouth forms a sheepish curve; he doesn't have the heart to distance himself from the problem, nor the courage to go towards it. He doesn't think he'd survive. "You said your birthday is in December."

"I was telling a lie," she says tartly, reluctantly ashamed, yet righteous in her decision. "You would have gotten me things if I had said it was a month ago. And since it has now passed, you cannot get me things, which is good."

"Who says?" Roy is decidedly wounded; she reads him so well, too well. With all her lashed glances that she has always used to carefully gauge his mood. "Who says I can't?"

"It will not be...sporting...of you to try." Alexandria takes a stab at the ice-cream they share between them, her elbows on the table.

He frowns, mouth twitching downwards and his eyes serious. "That's very cruel."

"I do not want you to be feeling obligated, Roy," she says quietly; and her eyes meet his, soft and meaningful. "There is nothing for me to forgive you for. You must not be feeling so hurt and sorry; is no need for you to carry something silly to the grave."

"...You're very cruel, telling me that." He plucks up her untouched glass of wine, breaks the stare and downs it. Suddenly bitter. "I don't forgive myself."

"Please do." Alexandria has such patient wise eyes; they are all for him, sometimes he feels it is so. "You don't have to feel like you have to see me all the time – "

"But I want to see you." He pushes forward forcefully, enough to give them both pause. But he recovers himself quickly, "Alexandria, I _want_ to see you."

"Oh, Roy," she says and pats the hand he's got clenched white on the table.

"Or...do I bother you?" He has trouble with the words, they come out hard in his throat, and he's very suddenly afraid.

"No; how can you be bother me?" She smiles. "You're the Masked Bandit, the Scourge of the South East – "

"You're different, though you're still the same; you're too grown up to be my Bandit Daughter anymore." The words are said tightly. "Yet, not grown up at all. I don't know, Alexandria, if I can be a Bandit anymore – "

"Roy – "

"You're very strong; you're grown up, and you're free. You don't need a hero, and I was never a good hero." He is suddenly, breathlessly telling her all of this, tiptoeing 'round the edges of a dangerous cliff. Oh, he can't torment himself anymore. "I'm not your father, Alexandria."

"...What are you saying?"

"I can't look at you as my daughter anymore." He admits it, and cannot look her in the eye. What he sees there might break him, and he can't stop halfway. "Please."

* * *

_When I fall asleep, you have to go._

_…Why?_

_I don't want you to see me like this..._

* * *

Later that night, he drops her off on her doorstep. The light above the fire escape flickers on, and an old woman's face flits suspiciously behind the blinds. His jaw is so tense; neither of them has said a word the whole way back. Alexandria stops before she goes in, turns around to look at him. Her eyes are troubled; worried, even.

The streetlights dye her dress lemon-yellow and paint shadows in the hollows of her throat; her hair is clipped up. She looks so beautiful, so never his.

She worries her lips, says, "Roy."

He closes his eyes; he cannot beg. He shouldn't.

"Roy." A feather-light touch along the corner of his jaw; her hand, fleeting yet meaningful, reminds him of a mother's, or a wife's. Except, she looks at him with a stranger's clarity, does not fog up her perception of him; will always see him as what she has chosen, and so clearly. "Roy, don't be so angry."

Her words are caught in her throat. He doesn't want to make her cry.

"I'm not angry." His mouth sneaks up a little, in a smile that would make him sick should he see it in the mirror. "Just needy. I feel like the child."

"That's because you're forever young," she answers with a soft smile, her fingers tender. "Alright."

"You're alchemy," he breathes. Damn the woman behind the blinds; he does not care if she hears, she could never understand. "Alexandria, you only make me seem so."

"I love you, Roy," she says shamelessly, and remorselessly. His mind attempts to reason before his heart can run away with his wits, because she cannot mean it the way he'd love to hear it. Her eyes are sincere, the colour of jewels. "So, don't disappear."

"I won't," he says quietly when she does not pull her hand away. The feel of her fingers is a soothing balm, yet a maddening flame that makes him so thirsty…

She smooths her touch down the line of his jaw as she retreats, tucks her hands back under her arms. "Promise? And don't cross your fingers."

"I won't." He smiles a little wryly at the familiar, previously-traversed part of the script; raises his palms up, fingers spread apart as far as they can go. A man with his hands in the air, his weapons dropped; oh, there is no surrender more painful and divine. None sweeter.

"See?"

* * *

_The problem was not his back. Not his spine. Not his legs._

_Do you know?_

_It's a band of five heroes, each pursuing his own brilliant death – and a princess, pink and poisonous as oleander blossoms._

_The problem is his heart, broken. And eyes, lost. Caught in a fever dream._

_Wakes up underwater, a mouthful of blood._

Open your eyes, Roy.

* * *

Makes the mistake of taking her out to a bar, once.

He isn't sure, exactly, what he was thinking; she can tell from the flit of his lashes against his eyes, the tenseness of his brows just moments from springing into an expression of regret. Roy pats out a cigarette from the pack in his palm, lights it – the bar top gleams like good mahogany and she has her hair down, has a soda bottle with a straw in it. Of all the things to drink.

"Prohibition ended only a few years ago," he tells her, by way of a remark. All the time he smokes, he looks at her like he has waited for her to tell him not to, like most women do. Or instead, excitedly, ask for a joint to try. "And, for some of us, it never started."

"You mean, you, Roy?" She tilts her head, eyes bright through a haze of smoke. Of course, she knew that he smoked, that he drank; every man had his weaknesses, what others would name vices. But Roy had no vices, not to Alexandria; he could be silly, prone to occasional, accidental bouts of selfishness, guilt – but he had this way of blinking and smiling, a twitch of his lips, as if he could be both befuddled and enchanted, in one sentence. It would matter little for him to stop smoking. When she leant her head on his arm on evenings in parks, the crisp sleeve of his shirt was always white and clean, with that tinge of smoke from rolled-up cigarettes; warm as burning oak – real.

"Of course." His mouth twitched, then; a quick half-smile that soon chipped into a grin. "Soda pop and I don't agree well enough to get along for long enough."

There's the sheen on his skin under the hot lights of the bar; it's warm, and makes the skin where the first two buttons of his shirt are undone gleam. Tanned hands propped on the table, body angled towards her.

Tequila.

Liquid courage, perhaps. Or just pain-killing solution.

She can only be there to stop him from falling too hard to the poison.

"How does it feel – not to, anymore, do stunts?"

"Not like much. Not too different."

"Will you…miss it?" His feet are folded at the ankles. And he tugs at his collar around his throat, the heat of a Californian night pressing down on them. She watches him down a shot like flavoured tap-water. It doesn't quench him, by the way he looks at the bottom of the glass, frowns ever so slightly. "...Much?"

"No."

She can't tell if he's lying. It's not easy to read him, now that she isn't five anymore. And she's dabbed peach perfume behind her ears, and her dress is pretty.

She isn't five anymore.

* * *

And then, at her doorstep, he is pressing a brown bag into her hands.

It's heavy.

He is soberly drunk. Yet, he had driven so meticulously down the road... But his eyes are feverish; he's very tall. And soda wasn't enough to make her remember why she let him this close to the building anyway; the aunt upstairs might have nagged her for it. But her doorstep is little more than a fire escape; and she has surpassed all curfews, anyway.

"What – "

"This is it. It's all of it," he says, his offering grasped in her hands. "Take it. I didn't think I would finish it; it's taken me weeks to fix it. It's been in the back of my drawer for years. I never forgot, Alexandria; and then I saw you again, and how could I leave it alone?"

She schools herself; she must not lecture him. She should be sensitive to him, considering he has admitted that he will never do another stunt, that he has quit; he had said not many stuntmen still found work, as old as he was.

"Thank you."

"Read it; all of it."

_Promise?_

"I will."

_Yes._

And then comes that exhilarating moment, where her heart stops, and they realize how close they are standing. The silence isn't a silence, because each star seems to be whispering over the hush of his breathing and her held breath. Roy is so tall. His head is dipped a little. Blood seems to pool right beneath the surface of her skin, like a warm summer blush, or the heart-thundering flush of a four-aces hand at a card table. Strange. She can now see that his eyes are just a little bit more gray than blue or green. And that sweet citrus tinge of tequila-with-lime that hovers over him, and did not quench him, does nothing to douse the fever. That he might kiss her seems...seems –

"Come in?"

She startles them both into reason. Roy starts back, and opens his mouth; hesitates, closes it. Then –

"Your relative…?"

Aunt? Damn her to hell. "It is fine. You're drunk."

"Not really." And they both know it. "Tipsy; a little buzzed. Not drunk, you soda pop girl." He snatches up tendrils of her hair, fingers only a little clumsy, proves his coordination; he could rest his chin on her head, should he ever wish it. "Alexandria, as wise as you are… No. I won't come in. I don't know why you asked."

She doesn't know, either. He withdraws, blinks at her, and then gives a slow smile – she isn't cruel enough to kiss him on the cheek like she would usually; it has come too naturally to her not to hurt him in some measure.

Alexandria closes herself in behind the door. Tears the parcel open before she can hear the start of the engine, and the lulling hum of wheels leaving, rolling out onto the road.

* * *

_Alright, close your eyes. What do you see?_

_Nothing._

_Rub them._

_…_

_Can you see the stars?_

* * *

Every page is crisp as cinders against her skin, inked words painted in the blood of the soul, the pen used to write them the mended pieces of a sparrow's snapped ribcage. Effortlessly painstaking. Roy. There are the five men again, who were really all parts of Roy to begin with – Otta Benga, Darwin, Luigi, the Indian, the Mystic…and the Bandit; even Odious. An adventure, a burning legend…and a love story – not romantic so much as it was written from the sunset across a desert sky. Words speaking in tongues the writers confined to the margins of a book could not imagine capturing. The whirling gold of a whirring lasso that spins sharp heat into the air, cutting into the moon when it is flung up. Her Roy, her Bandit; the tale of her carrying-away, the sheets of paper woven from carried-away childhood-spirit dust.

Like a wet breath, the rain falls. She reads of the bright sheen of grass blades that touch passing shins, skim the skin of naked legs dancing. A blue city, like a brother, or mirror, of the sky; blocks of Mediterranean buildings, cities in the heart of oceans, domes that strike up the land. The slow twist of trout in a river, silver-to-black. The mist of blood flung up above a battlefield, heavily soft like legends and grief. Nymphs caught in the nude. Leviathan wrestling warriors. The rustle of ashes as a breeze carries away a temple, black gleaming dust on the chiseled chests of cinder gladiators. Ladies with scented handkerchiefs held to their mouths in a scorching heat, fanning their necks with their intricately painted fingers.

Such life…such life.

Roy, who looked at her every day like she mattered. So much. As if her essence could not be dissolved, made soluble in the drab, commonplace mediocrity of the city. Who, as if she were the sun, could not face her.

Who truly thought his heart like a stone; like the tiny bright sphere of yellow bleaching the sky, so scorching hot to the touch – yet Alexandria holds her fingers up and spreads them wide against it.

In these small hands, she could engulf him. But never extinguish him.

His thick dancing brows, tilted like cruising wings. He; who downed tequila like he could not be quenched, yet he must try. Who talks to her – her Bandit, her childhood wanderlust – lost in Alexandria. Who, with arms flung upwards, she turns around and around in the long hover of trees, dancing in gasping gestures, into the grassy scorching dry tongue of their heroic imaginings, mocked by the undulations of an orange peel around her knife and his fingers, prying open, spraying citrus sweet.

Roy, who saw her as so brilliant, who painted her in words that not even Mona Lisa would dare call flattery, of such adoring, sweetly suffering adulation and worship; and love, and love, and love.

And she can only open her arms to him, because she never let go of him – her hero, her father-friend-lover-hero, conqueror.

Who is so, so Roy.

Who, eyes quavering, brave – crashes through all walls and finally kisses her the day after, enough to steal the wisps of her breath away. Mouth hot, like a man in a desert, sand-caked and skin broken. Kissing her like she was a well to drink and drink from, and he was so very dry.

Her storyteller; her lie-spinning, truthfully confused, yet sure, yet lost, can't-swim-lost-without-her _Roy._

"Good Bandits," he tells her, like she understands – and she does, "are thick as thieves; so never let me leave."

She hooks their pinkies, like they are kids with nickels and marbles.

And seals the blood oath, steps her feet on his feet, raises herself on tiptoe on the leather of his shoes.

Collects on that height difference.

Closes the distance.

* * *

_We're a strange pair, aren't we?_


End file.
